science, as a branch of human history, aims at universality, and finds the tongues of the humblest tribes as essential to her completeness as those of the most cultivated and gifted nations; but it is also true that, mindful of proportion, she passes more lightly over the one, to give her longer and more engrossed attention to the other. While the weal and woe of every individual that ever lived goes to make up the sum of human interests, with which our human nature both justifies and demands our sympathy, we cannot but linger longest and with keenest participation over the fortunes of those who have played a great part among their fellows, whose deeds and words have had a wide and deep-reaching influence. And this is, in a very marked degree, the character of the Indo-European race. Its first entrance as an actor into what we are accustomed to call universal history, or that drama of action and influence whose denouement is the culture of the modern European nations, was in the far East, in the Persian empire of Cyrus and his successors. This founded itself upon the ruins and relics of more ancient empires and cultures, belonging to other peoples, in part Semitic, in part of obscurer kindred. For the Indo-Europeans were, of all the great civilizing and governing races, the last to commence their career. Not only in Mesopotamia, but also in Egypt and China, the light of knowledge burned brightly, and great deeds were done, whereof the world will never lose the memory, while the tribes of our kindred were wandering savages, or weak and insignificant communities, struggling for existence. The Persian empire, in its conquering march westward, was first checked by one of these humble communities, the little jarring confederation of Greek states and cities, destined to become, notwithstanding its scanty numbers, the real founder of Indo-European preëminence. Greece, enriching itself with elements drawn from the decaying institutions of older races, assimilated them, and made them lively and life-giving, with an energy of genius unrivalled elsewhere in the annals of the world. The wider the range of our historical study, the more are we penetrated with the transcendent ability of the Greek race. In art, literature, and science, it has been what the Hebrew
